IBM's Sequoia confirmed as world's fastest supercomputer

Clocking a performance of 16.32 petaflop/s, IBM's Blue Gene/Q-class supercomputer Sequoia has become the fastest supercomputer in the world according to the latest TOP500 rankings released today. Sequoia, owned by the Department of Energy and based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has relegated Fujitsu's K to second place.

Using LINPACK benchmarking, Sequoia was found to be approximately 55 percent faster than K, which achieved 10.51 petaflop/s to Sequoia's 16.32 petaflop/s (or 16,320,000,000,000,000 flop/s). Standing for floating point operations per second, flop/s are a more sophisticated measure of computer performance than instructions per second, representative of the scientific calculations such supercomputers are likely to perform.

Impressively, Sequoia is reportedly one of the most energy-efficient computers on the list, consuming 7.9 MW of power to K's 12.7 MW. This gives Sequoia an efficiency of approximately 2.07 teraflop/s/W to K's 0.83 teraflop/s/W. Lower power consumption is central to IBM's ongoing Blue Gene project.